Dida is a dialect cluster of the Kru familyspoken in Ivory Coast. ISO divides Dida into three groups, Yocoboué Dida, Lakota Dida, and Gaɓogbo which are only marginally mutually intelligible and best considered separate languages. Yocoboué consists of the Lozoua and Divo dialects, and Lakota the Lakota, Abou, and Vata dialects. The prestige dialect is the Lozoua speech of the town of Guitry.
Phonology
The Dida lects have consonant and vowel inventories typical of the Eastern Kru languages. However, tone varies significantly between dialects, or at least between their descriptions. The following phonology is that of Abu Dida, from Miller.
Vowels
Dida has a ten-vowel system: nine vowels distinguished by "tenseness", likely either pharyngealization or supra-glottal phonation of the type described as retracted tongue root, plus an uncommon mid-central vowel. The non-contracted vowels are, and the contracted vowels. The formants of the tense vowels show them to be lower than their non-tense counterparts: the formants of the highest tense vowels overlap the formants of the non-tense mid vowels, but there is visible tension in the lips and throat when these are enunciated carefully. Dida has a number of diphthongs, which have the same number of tonal distinctions as simple vowels. All start with the higher vowels,, and except for, both elements are either contracted or non-contracted, so the pharyngealization is here transcribed after the second element of the vowel. Examples are "bottle", "get stuck", and "little bone". Dida also has nasal vowels, but they are not common and it is not clear how many. Examples are "nothing", "chin", "25 cents". In diphthongs, nasalization shows up primarily on the second element of the vowel. Vowel length is not distinctive, apart from phonesthesia, morphemic contractions, and shortened grammatical words, such as the modal "will".
Consonants
The consonants are typical for Eastern Kru: Syllables may be vowel only, consonant-vowel, or consonant--vowel. is a lateral approximant initially, a lateral flap between vowels and after most consonants, but a central tap after alveolars. After a nasal, it is itself nasalized, and sounds like a short n. There is a short epenthetic vowel between the initial consonant and the flap, which takes the quality of the syllabic vowel that follows. Flap clusters occur with all consonants, even the approximants, apart from the alveolar sonorants and the marginal consonant, which is only attested in the syllable. is implosive in the sense that the airstream is powered by the glottis moving downward, but there is no rush of air into the mouth. occurs in few words, but one of these, "appear", occurs in numerous common idioms, so overall it's not an uncommon sound. It is a true fricative and may devoice to word initially. and plus a vowel are distinct from or plus and another vowel. They may also be followed by a flap, as in "face". When emphasized, zero-onset words may take an initial, and initial approximants may become fricated. becomes palatalized before high front vowels, or when emphasized.
Tones
Dida uses tone as a grammatical device. Morpho-tonology plays a greater role in verb and pronominal paradigms than it does in nouns, and perhaps because of this, Dida verbs utilize a simpler tone system than nouns do: Noun roots have four lexically contrastive tones, subject pronouns have three, and verb roots have just two word tones. There are three level tones in Abou Dida: , , and , with about twice as common as the other two. Speaker intuition hears six contour tones: rising and falling. However, some of these only occur in morphologically complex words, such as perfective verbs. Monosyllabic nouns contrast four tones: and : "egg", "leopard", "buffalo", "arrow", with and being the most frequent.
